Dhivehi

Where it’s spoken

Dhivehi (also Divehi or Maldivian) is the sole national language of the Maldives, spoken by virtually the entire population of around 400,000. A related variety, Mahl, is spoken on Minicoy Island in India’s Lakshadweep. Several regional dialects exist across the archipelago’s atolls.

What it sounds like

Dhivehi shares its core grammar and vocabulary with Sinhala — they diverged from a common ancestor around 500 BCE — but with extensive Arabic loanwords from Islamic adoption in the 12th century, and English vocabulary from the more recent colonial period.

How it’s written

The Thaana script, in use since around 1700, is written right-to-left like Arabic. It uses base letters for consonants and a fixed set of diacritics for vowels — a design borrowed from the Arabic abjad. Latin-script romanisation is also widely used.